The Decline and Fall of the Roman and American Republics

Then

In 146 BC, roughly 350 years after it’s founding, the Roman Republic reached the peak of its powers with the final victory against Carthage.  After a century of on and off conflict between the two sprawling Mediterranean empires, Consul Scipio Aemilianus sacked the North Africa capital, and sold its inhabitants into slavery. The story of sowing the Carthiginian soil with salt is alas apocryphal, but effectively Carthage was wiped from the face of the earth. This was the apogee of the Republic, the shining moment of glory before internal divisions eventually led to chaos in the next century.

The defeat of Carthage left no worthy rival to Romans, except themselves. Recently conquered Spain, Greece, and North Africa brought an embarrassment of riches into Rome, but spoils of war mostly flowed into the pockets of a tiny number of patrician families. For the majority of Romans, the wars took them away from their homes and farms, and soldiers often came home flat broke. The divergence of rich and poor started a split of Roman society to haves and have nots, who started to antagonize each other. Reform efforts like the Lex Agraria, that attempted to address the growing inequality, became lightning rods that evoked a furious patrician reaction greater partisanship. 

Romans consequently became polarized around the pro-reform populares and the anti-reform and aristocratic optimates. The battle lines were drawn, adversarial tactics became more and more extreme, and soon enough the conflict eventually spilled over from political infighting, to mob violence, and eventually civil war. 

Now

In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet Union was no more. Throughout the better part of the 20th century, the USSR was the ideological, political, and military arch-nemesis to America. Now, roughly 200 years after it’s founding, the United States of America stood alone as the sole superpower, largest economy, and unchallenged hegemon of the world.

At this apex of power, the American society had already begun to splinter between rich and poor. Income inequality had begun its upward march to record highs as neoliberal economics and deregulation funneled more and more of newly created wealth to the millionaires and billionaires as real wages stagnated for the working class. This divergence led to reform efforts, notably from the anti-capitalist democratic socialist wing of the left. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren and the like spoke out against the privileged treatment of capital at the burden to labor, but they have also evoked the fury of Fox News and the Republican party for daring to suggest something so “communist.”

Alongside the divergence between rich and poor, the political left and right became starkly polarized. Ezra Klein has done a great job documenting this phenomenon in his 2020 book. Klein points out that today’s independents are even more partisan than the self-identified Democrat or Republican partisans of the 70s. The battle lines have been drawn.

Note: the partisanship between democrats and republicans today, unlike the partisanship between populares and optimates, is less polarized on the axis purely of populist egalitarianism vs aristocratic elitism (arguably both American parties can lay a credible claim on the populist mantle). Instead, we are polarized more on the axis of race, and social issues like abortion and gun rights. The role that socioeconomics does play is complicated: While democrats fight for the actual economic interests of the lower and middle class, republicans lay claim to working class identity through cultural issues.

Then

In the 2nd century BCE, after two hundred years of fighting and dying alongside Romans in wars across the Mediterranean,  non-Roman Italians were sick of second class citizenship. While bearing the burden of Rome’s military ventures, Italians were denied the benefits of Roman citizenship like representation in the Senate, the Assemblies, and access to land grants for settlement in new Roman colonies.

In 125 BCE, the first bill proposing Italian citizenship was brought to the Assembly, but was then suppressed by fierce opposition from the Roman nobility, as was a second effort three years later. 

Three decades later, civil war broke out between Italians and Romans after yet another proposal for Italian citizenship was rejected. 300,000 Romans and Italians died over four years of fighting (roughly one out of every 20 individuals), before the peace was concluded with expansion of the franchise finally granted to the Italian peninsula. 

Now

In 1870, after a long bloody civil war, America granted citizenship and guaranteed political franchise to five million African Americans, just five years after the 13th amendment emancipated all African Americans from slavery. Soon however, the retrenchment of Jim Crow rule in the south ensured black Americans would be second-class citizenship for another hundred years before the Civil Rights movement brought about reforms that sought to fulfill the original promise of the 15th amendment. In the meanwhile, political franchise had also expanded to include women in 1920, Asian Americans in 1952, and adults aged 18-21 in 1971.

But every step of the way, we continue to see reactionary backlash from conservatives and nativists. Even today, racial gerrymandering dilutes the votes of Americans of color, and dozens of voter suppression acts have been introduced in Republican state legislatures just this year.

Then

While Romans were known to be a society obsessed with laws, they never had a written constitution nor an extensive body of written laws. In its place, Romans had (what Duncan describes as) a body of “unwritten rules, traditions, and mutual expectations collectively known as mos maiorum,” or, “the way of the elders.” These norms helped to ensure functioning governance in the face of adversarial politics. However, as inequality and partisanship fueled divisiveness in the late second century, the norms that previously preserved order and peace began to come apart:

1. In 134 BCE populare reformers broke with mos maiorum to depose a sitting Tribune, a political office long held sacrosanct, in efforts to push through the Lex Agraria reforms.
2. In 88 BCE, at the beginning of coming decades of civil war, a Roman general led his army into Rome itself to occupy the capital for the first time, crossing the sacred inner boundary of Rome, within which no citizen was to bear arms.
3. In 86 BCE, after centuries of the tradition for consuls to never serve multiple terms, Gaius Marius was elected to his seventh consulship.

Now

Our American mos maiorum is breaking down too, all too quickly… and one party bears much greater responsibility than the other.

When George W. Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, the Republican-led congress transformed itself into an arm of the executive, creating a custom that became known as the “Hastert Rule.” The rule declared that the House would now rely only on Republican votes to pass bills, and they would reach the floor only if they secured a “majority of the majority.” This was death to bipartisan coalitions. Furthermore, to promote the Bush agenda, the Republican Speaker also bent and strained the existing rules and customs of the House of Rep.

Abuse of the filibuster, historically reserved to rare and extreme occasions, became commonplace under Mitch McConnell’s Republican control of the Senate throughout the Obama presidency. Roughly half of the uses of the filibuster in history, was used by McConnell’s caucus in these 8 years, most often against non-controversial presidential nominations to fill critical government posts.

Lastly in 2016, against all precedence, Mitch McConnell refused to consider any presidential nominations to fill the vacant supreme court seat, citing a novel theory that court vacancies during an election year should be filled by the next elected executive, contrary to the explicit instructions of the US constitution. Four years later he promptly reversed course to confirm the GOP-nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the court.

Then

The century preceding the fall of Roman Republican government was a century defined by it’s demagogues. It started with the Gracchus brothers in the 130s BCE, who used populist land reform as a rallying point to seize power for the populares, and broke the spell of the sanctity of mos maiorum. Although they both died violent deaths (at the hands of optimate mobs), as Duncan writes, their lives showed the following generation “just how far cynically manipulated mob violence could push a man’s career forward.”

They set the precedence for ever more bold demagogues to follow. First Marius, who died in office during his 7th consulship on 86 BCE. Then came Sulla, the Optimate response to Marius who won the first waves of Roman civil wars of this century, and the first (but not last) to claim the “dictator for life” title in 82 BCE. Then Julius Ceasar, who took Sulla’s mantle as dictator for life in 44 BCE just before his own assassination. This lineage of demagogues culminated in Caesar Augustus, who used all the tricks of mob manipulation and power grabs from his spiritual antecedents to enshrine demagogic authoritarianism into the institution of the emperorship.

Now

America is no stranger to demagogues. Even well before recent events, Huey Long and Father Coughlin stoked our collective fascist and nativist tendencies as fascism became all the rage around the world just before WWII. Joseph McCarthy used his particularly anti-communist flavor of nativist demagoguery to bully the Senate and the country in the 1950s. These and others who tapped into the uglier strains in our American legacy all helped set the stage for Donald Trump, who came along at a time when, once again, authoritarianism is waxing and liberal democracy waning.

Then

With all the rapidly deteriorating civil politics described above, it should not surprise you that Rome’s first century BCE was filled with turbulence and violence. Mob violence became commonplace, with consuls and tribunes, and prominent leaders of both major factions murdered by mobs. Political violence became a routine part of Roman politics,  with deadly mobs breaking out in the capital in 133, 121, 100, and 91 BCE.

Within 60 years, Rome saw at least six civil wars: the Social War in 91 BCE, Marius & Sulla had two civil wars in the 80s BCE, Julius Caesar’s civil war in the 40s BCE, and then three more post-Caesarian civil wars. A total of at least a million Romans of multiple generations died fighting each other in these wars. Breakdown of norms, demagoguery, these all have consequences, and Romans of the 1st century paid the price in blood.

Now

Fortunately, America has not (yet) fallen into civil war (although there is no shortage of soothsayers warning of one). Nonetheless, we cannot deny that violence is a part of our politics now. Even before the January 6th insurrection, there was the Michigan plot to kidnap a sitting governor, and deranged individuals like Kyle Rittenhouse and Dylann Roof, responsible for gun massacres with political aims (Roof wanted to spark a “race war”). We are not in civil war yet, but recent events are not encouraging.

Then

The Roman crisis of the first century eventually came to an end.  In 31 BCE, just over a century after Rome’s defeat of Carthage, Caesar Augustus defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra, putting an end to a century of almost non-stop civil war and partisan violence. His victory traded a century of strife for two centuries of (relative) peace, the Pax Romana, an age of Roman expansion and thriving. Peace and expansion all sounds good and well, but in the bargain Rome betrayed her ancient Republican legacy. Throughout the five centuries of the Roman Republic, Roman citizens had decisively rejected the tyranny of monarchy, but the chaos of the first century saw Roman distaste for tyranny surpassed by their distaste of civil war and violence. The people wanted peace at any cost. Augustus offered peace, and didn’t even ask for the title of Rex, just the powers of one. Although Augustus and the first emperors initially simply styled themselves princeps – “first citizen,” and although ornaments of republicanism remained (a defanged senate, continuance of the Tribuneship and Consulship), there was no turning back now, the last five centuries of Rome would be centuries of authoritarianism and empire, not of Republicanism.

Now

Mark Twain warned us that although history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. Recent America history has dutifully traced a second verse to Rome’s 1st century crisis. We seem to fit the same mold: from the internal strife after defeat of an archrival, to festering partisanship, rising inequality, to the fight over expanding franchise. But it would be facile to conclude that we are the Roman Republic at the dawn of the 1st century BCE, and ahead of us lies civil war, eventual peace at the cost of our republic, and the failure of the American experiment.

This particular exercise in comparative history has not offered much reason for optimism for American Democracy, but then again we Americans have always prided ourselves in being unencumbered by the millennia of history that saddled the old world. We like to believe (perhaps deludedly), that we can chart our own course. For the sake of the coming century, I sure hope we can.